React Native’s StyleSheet is CSS3! It works the same way… and react native is 100% native.
Genymotion android emulator is free if you choose ‘I’m trying genymotion for playing games’ option
Android Studio now takes 10 minutes to render android app on laptop.
Genymotion takes about the same but once emulator is running, you can update your app to emulator when you want by tapping R key twice. It will show you changes made on app in a second.
and it has lots of android smartphone models you can choose from! Pixel, Galaxy S7, S8, Edge, many LG Nexus models are all available to preview on desktop.
I actually use phonegap, but just to build. And for onesignal. However old, it’s a good read. Finding a down to earth article about tech is like finding a purple unicorn.
At the prompt of @Sujan12, I’ll post a reply slightly more in depth than the one I deleted.
One of the things I’ve tried to reinforce with my team is you never disconnect responsibility from accountability. Currently, the Ionic team is attempting to take responsibility of the plugins by offering them as solutions, yet not take accountability for the plugins and play somewhat of a “blame game” by deferring issues to the plugin when issues arise.
In the end, the Ionic team is accountable for the success of all cordova plugins they integrate with because their customers (developers) can and should hold them accountable for the plugins they suggest to install.
Until their team takes accountability for these plugin’s success, they will have varied loyalty from their customers and varied adoption rate.
One of the things I’ve stumbled upon is the lack of documentation on the dependency matrix. There’s at least 4 simultaneous dependencies I’m aware of, there are probably more I’m unaware of:
Cordova Version
Cordova-[Android|IOS] Version
Cordova Plugin Version
Ionic Npm Package Version
I found out these details via discovery because the Ionic team doesn’t offer any of this absolutely required information on their plugin pages.
IMO, the Ionic Team should be taking on builds and testing the plugins they suggest to run. The plugins are open source, they can either do PRs or they can roll them into their own registry with fixes. Until then, they can’t really offer a stable product themselves.
If I were king of Ionic, I’d be running my own NPM registry. Testing and syncing successfully tested plugin builds (by them) into the registry. Have the ionic CLI point to their registry of known-good builds. Package the happy-path versions together as a package in order to synchronize versions to ensure the highest quality, which should be documented on the plugin pages as well. I would additionally ensure plugin integration between plugins so that you don’t end up with mutually exclusive plugins.
I can tell you, I’m definitely evaluating alternatives based on my limited experiences so far, as has been suggested on this thread. Which is sad, because the effort to make this product('s quality) excellent doesn’t seem so large as to warrant not doing it.
(Disclaimer: Although I am a moderator here, I do not work for Ionic. This is a volunteer thing, so I do not speak for Ionic in any capacity.)
Funny how different this turned out @innovationjeff to your previous post - and I think you are pretty much all wrong.
Or better, you are missing one important bit:
Ionic Native is not a commercial product. It is no product at all. No one here is paying for Ionic Native plugins. They are an Open Source offering by Ionic that you are all using for free.
(Same for Cordova and Cordova plugins and Ionic Framework itself by the way!)
If you were paying for “plugins”, native functionality etc. you could ask for accountability, responsibility or many other things. But again, this is not a commercial product offered by Ionic. You are entitled to nothing.
(In contrast: If you are paying for Ionic Pro you have the right to a working Ionic Package system, Ionic View and Dev app, Ionic Monitor system etc. Tested, supported Ionic Native plugins are still not part of that package.)
I really don’t understand where this entitlement, claim or right for “something” comes from when using free Open Source software. You are entitled to use the software as it is, nothing else.
Which all doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nice to have fully supported and tested Ionic Native plugins, or any other way to use native functionality in a stable and simple way. Feel free to build it!
You are your own king, and if this really is such a great thing/business as you say, you will be a rich king as well. No Ionic (company) needed at all for it.
@Sujan12, I think I didn’t communicate my intent quite right. I wasn’t intending to communicate a sense of entitlement. I was intending to communicate how I would operate were I in a similar situation as Ionic’s.
If I understand Ionic’s strategy correctly, they’ve made themselves voluntarily, intentionally dependent on opensource plugins for their actual product to work well and their product’s quality is at least partially determined by those plugins ability to function.
i.e. I can’t use Ionic if I can’t get the plugins they rely on to work!
It is this reason I would take, under the umbrella of my accountability, the plugins I’ve chosen to be dependent upon. Just because I want my product’s quality to be high and for people to have a great experience, always.
Nice to see that this discussion has moved in a full circle and we are back at my original question / statement
As Ionic is not responsible for the plugins (althought they do maintain some forks with bugfixes btw!), but they DO advertise ionic native pretty big on their website,so the least they can do is let the community help out more. And by that I mean being very active in the bug-and PR que’s. So do not leave legitimate questions unanswered for months, close irrelevant topics etc…
Pretty interesting discussion all in all, thnx for that
Very good discussion! I’m still out in Left Field on why the plugin developers aren’t getting paid by anyone (not singling out Ionic. Lots of frameworks are using the things. Including Apple and Android who benefit from increased exposure).
Is it because of the open-source, free to play culture?
Is it becuase a plugin union sounds far-fetched?
Is it because they don’t want to be held accountible / responsible over long periods of time? Which I get.
Should a 3rd party take over their work, charge for use of plugins, maintain them, and pay a percentage to the creator?
If any plugin developers want to weigh in, that would be a real bonus. I just think a little structure in the world of plugins could go a long way toward increasing sanity among Hybrid developers, and would get some money in the pockets of the plugin devs (by far the most confusing part of this arrangement. A labor of love can only go so far withough ANY compensation). If I wasn’t 4 days late on rent every month I’d be donating to these devs like a madman.
And, @remco75, I delved into using the File plugin and File Transfer plugin last night and I already want to put my head through a wall. I actually tend to find Ionic’s docs on native plugins adequate, if a little bare bones. Combine those bare-bones with info in node_modules and the actual git repos of the plugin and I can generally piece things together with only moderate levels of rage. Once i get to Cordova’s docs, my sanity crumbles.
Ionic is in most cases useless without the native plugins. However I do find that most plugins does work great. And if there is one or two plugins that your team needs, you are free to help them develop it. You can rarely get everything for ‘free’.
A bit more documentation about known flaws should be listed on the respective plugin pages. Like the FileTransfer plugin for example.
They are not paid because they don’t charge money but producing Open Source software. It is not easy to get paid for writing Open Source libraries, plugins etc.
They are on Github, so you are free to improve them
It would be much better if Ionic team takes better control of plugins & manage & upgrade… I anticipate this will happen when Avocado gets released. There are lots of users who like Ionic’s HTML5 & CSS3 UI & Angular 5.
Please don’t tell us users are accountable for every bug of cordova. I started using it mainly because Ionic team’s advertisement on their website. Then I discovered Cordova is something Ionic team don’t manage & is actually out of their control. If I were to run a business based on building frameworks, I would at least try to run it based on something I can control… rather than something other guys created for free.
If you guys make commercial plugins which come with guaranteed management, update, upgrade, I would consider buying… but that will make sense when all these get stabilized by replacing cordova with avocado.
That’s so impressive. I’ve looked through a lot of the plugin code and these folks put sooo much work into them. Pretty gracious. Especially the googlemaps guy. He’s on here all the time helping people. Buy that man a beer!
If I can, I will. I’m not yet as talented as most of the developers. When I’m able, I’m on it.
I don’t want to come off as “entitled”, it’s simply that I have certain requirements, and I’m wondering whether Ionic is heading in a direction that would fulfill them.
I also don’t want to blame anyone, neither Ionic, nor the plugin developers that didn’t decided to be a part of this, we know that they are mostly doing it for free, and it’s their choice how they want to handle things. I’m maintaining some open source stuff myself, and I know that unless it’s a project with large public interest, you’re most of the time simply on your own.
That being said, Ionic Native is advertised as an important part of Ionic (Ionic Framework):
Ionic Framework offers the best web and native app components for building highly interactive native and progressive web apps.
Premier Native Plugins
Use over 120 native device features like Bluetooth, HealthKit, Finger Print Auth, and more with Cordova/PhoneGap plugins and TypeScript extensions.
Without the native plugins, Ionic apps aren’t much more than websites viewed through a native app, that’s nice, but I don’t really need Ionic for that purpose, I could write such a wrapper app myself, and there’s also many competitors out there that offer the very same, so the question is why should I, or anyone for that matter, choose Ionic over anyone else?
I mean, from a business point of view that’s what the Ionic team wants, right? They want me to choose their product, and so they have to offer something that makes me want to do so, something like a nice selection of plugins that takes away the need to write native functionality for multiple platforms on my own, at least for me personally that is something that would make me choose their product, and spend my money on it.
Yes, that part is currently free, and we all know the “don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth” saying, but that’s a) Ionics choise, not mine, and b) there’s lots of these horses on the field, so that’s not really an argument that would make me consider choosing Ionics horse over anyone else’s.
Don’t get me wrong, such a business model is absolutely legitimate, and if that is how Ionic wants it to be, that’s totally fine. And I know that I could of course help on the plugins, but that’s simply not what I’m looking for, I’m looking for something that actually saves me time, not something that requires me to help maintaining 20 additional projects, if I wanted that, I’d simply write everything myself.
Again, I really don’t want to step on anyones toes, I’m just trying to figure out if Ionic is for me, ie that’s just my 2 cents, and maybe it’s valuable feedback, maybe not, we’ll see.
